Don't they see it?

-
Behind every freelancer, is some staid soul with a job who listens to tales of how the freelancing world is different and dangerous, how great despair must be endured for supreme creativity, how they fight the lonely battle of clinging to principles and personality when you sorry EMI-ridden creature have sold your soul to be a corporate cog in the wheel that itself is stuck in the rut. Having a job somehow ensures that you will never bring a worthy enough problem to the conversation. But having a job makes you a necessary evil to reach out to for contacts or funding or cleaning up some mess that the freewheeling world of working on your own gets you into. Behind every freelancer is some person in the house willing to make do with less attention, more mood-swings, extensive participation in 'I-me-myself-my woes-my creative dogma-i am alone but will make it - you will never understand because your life is so much easier' soliloquy. Behind every freelancer is possibly someone who has accepted, if not understood, that you can't plan a regular holiday or a regular day in the park or Sunday grocery shopping because you never know when work comes through. Someone who has accepted, if not understood, that they will always have to take the fall or will never be asked, "Did your day go well?" Someone who has accepted, if not understood, that they will always come second to a head-rush that a new assignment will give.

In recent times I have met freelancers. In recent times, I have been one. How can anyone who freelances truly believe that they do it on their own?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei...
Read more